Under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) Initiative, which is becoming a required program in hospitals across the United States, healthcare providers are responsible for readmissions related to the index surgery for 30 days and eventually for 90 days. Although there may be a variety of reasons for patient readmission, surgical site infection is one of the leading causes for readmission. In addition, these surgical site infections can lead to further complications and must often be treated by antibiotics. Often times surgical site infections may even lead to the need of additional surgeries to correct the infection. In some applications, particularly those dealing with joint replacement, surgical site infections can lead to diminished functional outcome of the surgery and may even lead to permanent functional issues including limps, stiff joints, chronic infection, and even amputation.
Airborne contamination plays a primary role in the cause of surgical site infection. It was found in a study of 6000 patients that rigorous airborne and procedural contamination control could reduce the deep surgical site infection rate to 0.3-0.4%. This low rate of surgical site infection was achieved without the use of prophylactic antibiotics; whereas now it is estimated that surgical site infection rate after total join arthroplasty is nearly 1% (with a wide range of variation in the data) even with the use of prophylactic antibiotics. Although it is understood that several factors may play a role in the development of a surgical site infection, contamination control, particularly of airborne sources, still results in a dramatic increase in infection rate.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,251,624 issued to Matsumura et al. on Jun. 26, 2001 entitled Apparatus and method for detecting, quantifying and characterizing microorganisms, the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, teaches a method for performing microbial antibiotic suspectibility testing. However, it fails to teach the testing within close proximity to specific areas of suspectibility for infection for the human body during surgery. It also does not teach a holder for containing the settle plates.
Although there have been techniques developed to control airborne contaminations in operating rooms, the success of these existing techniques can only be measured by observing the surgical site infection rates coming from these operating rooms. That is, the only way to currently determine whether airborne contamination occurred during a procedure is to wait until the patient develops a surgical site infection. This results in delayed feedback to the surgeon or hospital that there is a possible problem with the surgeon's techniques, supplies, or equipment. A system for providing feedback regarding the airborne contamination of an operating room closer to the actual time of surgery is desired.